Raintree County BANNED?
Raintree County BANNED?
1948: Seized in Philadelphia
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"The Book-of-the-Month Club shied away from my father's racy book-jacket design. Instead of a naked woman embedded in the landscape, we find Adam and Eve in full Victorian dress doing a minuet as Eve prepares to receive an apple from an accommodating snake."
--Shade of the Raintree, Larry Lockridge, p. 404
"[In
1948] Raintree County marched on without its author, leading
most bestseller lists through April and May of 1948 before falling
away. [Raintree County's] bizarre postpublication history
continued with its nationally publicized seizure and empoundment,
beginning on March 20, by the Philadelphia vice squad, led by
one Craig Ellis. Five booksellers were arrested. The vice squad
was following the lead of Fordham's Reverend Barrett. Lockridge's
suicide seemed to many a manifestation of God's taste in literature,
vindicating those who denounced the novel as obscene and blasphemous.
Delegations
of priests and ministers lined up in Federal District Court in
eastern Pennsylvania to denounce the novel as "lewd, obscene,
licentious, filthy and indecent." Houghton Mifflin fought
the seizure handily, arguing that priestly celibates lack the
credentials to judge in matters of sex.
Only two
weeks before Houghton Mifflin prevailed in court, on October
31, 1950, vice-squad chief Craig Ellis put a bullet through his
brain, leaving a suicide note. "I have failed as a leader.
My wife did not know of my laxity. I suppose my pain has made
me mad. I pray God will help any I may have caused regret."
From Shade of the Raintree, pp. 455-6
Celebrating the Freedom
to Read
Raintree County: Attacked in NY City (1953) as "1066 pages of rank obscenity, blasphemy & sacrilege ... inimical to faith & morals (&) within the prohibition of the Catholic Index".
From: Banned Books Week, 1986
(Celebrating the Freedom to Read)
"A resource Book" by Robert P. Doyle
American Lib. Ass., Chicago, 1986
Source: 8,Vol.IV, P. 709.
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Posted Oct. 2009